The online home of novelist Lee McAulay

In keeping with that scant tradition, here’s my recommendations for this year’s festive viewing. I prefer to suggest interesting entertainment to contrast the seasonal dominance of cutesy cartoons and/or ubermacho explode-y violence, both of which have their place; this ain’t it.

1. Dr Zhivago. Snow, magnificent snow. One of the most beautiful films of the 1960s both in terms of visual appeal and story. Filmed in Canada and Spain, the cast includes Omar Sharif and Julie Christie and Tom Courtenay, often dwarfed by director David Lean’s huge landscape cinematography.

The frozen house in Dr Zhivago, actually filmed in Almeria

2. Historias Minimas. One of my friends described watching this gentle film in a form of mild anxiety, expecting that somehow things would take a turn for the worse (I suspect he was channeling Pulp Fiction too much). Another movie with gigantic scenery, this time of southern Argentina. (in Spanish with English subtitles)

3. Conversations With My Gardener. Gentle, sunny, charming film which – like Historias Minimas – hums along like a bumblebee amongst the honeysuckle on a warm brick wall. If you are the sort of person for whom the world in December is a non-stop parade of dull grey skies and cold winds, this one will warm you to the tootsies. (in French with English subtitles)

4. Last Orders. An ensemble cast of British actors in a gentle film about the lives of ordinary people, across decades. One to enjoy for the sake of viewing professional actors just – well, acting. The story has a nice balance, the sweetness blended with sadness in just the right measure. And there’s a camper van, for those of you who like that sort of thing.

5. Belleville Rendezvous aka The Triplets of Belleville. A modern classic. French animation, featuring an evil overlord, kidnappings, three weird sisters, a boy and his bicycle and his very determined mother. Worth viewing a couple of times to spot the small details you missed first time round.

Reading through Project Albatross, my long-lost post-apocalyptic novel, after a gap of more than twenty-five years, is a little bit of personal time travel.

I remember where I lived when I wrote the story – which city, which house, who I shared with, what my rooms were like, and a fantastic big writing-desk that must have come from a bank.

The music I listened to, which is a major key into certain scenes, is a strong influence.

Likewise the subjects I was studying – which included a scenic diversion from European prehistory into some British archaeology up to the early Mediaeval period. (It’s no surprise that was the year I had no exams, giving me the time and mental space to write a novel.)

The locations I’d lived in and travelled by then also played their part. Poetry, art and arty films.

But it’s the books I’d read, more than anything else, which show up in my memories.

Belmarch, a slim and peculiar novel of the First Crusade by Christopher Davis, an author whose other works I never sought out.

A good handful of Aldous Huxley, from school-years study of Brave New World to his light early comedies such as Crome Yellow, via The Doors of Perception (of course) and The Devils of Loudon*.

Since I started this blog, I’ve used the clever little WordPress “follow” feature to receive updates from a variety of other sites.

This was particularly useful when I was an active participant in A Round Of Words In 80 Days, as I followed a number of fellow participants when we all chipped in to report on our writing progress.

But: 100+ other blogs in my reader?

I can’t keep up.

Some of those sites have fallen silent, abandoned back in 2014 or earlier.

Some were only used to report writing progress as part of the RW80 Challenge, and the writer(s) have other sites off WordPress.

And some, I have to admit, were downright mind-boggling when I went through the list at the weekend to do some “weeding”.

As in, what the blazes was I thinking when I linked to this one? Since when was I interested in that subject? Has the writer changed focus so much in the last mmphle years that what was once fascinating is now tedious, or trite, or just off-key?

Quite a lot of those links were archived.

It’s 2017, after all. My recent sabbatical from posting online has taught me that a dormant site last updated in 2012 isn’t going to revive any time soon, no matter how interesting it might have been back then.

When the indie publishing scene kicked off big-time there was a lot of information to be assimilated, new ideas formulated and shared, upheaval and disruption and interesting times.

Not so much now.

Bertha Lum: The Fox Woman

We should all be open to new influences on our art and our writing: to fill the well, explore new ideas, be guided by different lanterns along an unfamiliar path; and to make space for those, some of the old used-up patches on our cloak have to be teased into rags, tied to a wayside tree and left behind to show our progress.

Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish.

(Art: while researching the copyright to an image I intended to use in the first draft of this post I meandered over wikipedia – as you do – until I found the fabulous Bertha Lum.)

In the middle of 2016 I rediscovered what I’ll call Project Albatross: my post-apocalyptic novel written in 1990, a wild crazy drama laced with climate change and socio-political upheaval on the far side of Hubbert’s Peak.

My punctuation is wildly creative. From my current perspective, 25 years on, I can only wonder why I chose to use so many commas and semi-colons when the obvious thing to do is shut the flippin’ sentence off with a full stop and start a new one.

Literary paragraphs, running on and on without pause, without dialogue, without line breaks. Even when there’s a change of character speaking. I’ve read novels like that and given up on them halfway through (I’m looking at you, 2666).

Single-sentence chapters.

Typing it out from longhand sheets where very little alterations have been made – and very few crossings-out – it’s like reading a story I once knew by heart. While I’ve forgotten the complexity of the story, and some of the iconography, sometimes a phrase leaps out at me from the page as if fresh in my memory and I know exactly how it ends, like a quotation or a prose poem.

Overall, I’m surprised at the scope of my ambition, even if the 25-years-ago version of me fails to deliver on some of that. Huh: everyone’s young once.

No, I didn’t think it was worth publishing. Not in its current state. As a part of my body of work, it stands alone, although probably less so than I think. (Apparently writers are not great judges of their own work.)

Will I publish it, and the dead novel from 2012, at some point in the future? Maybe.

Here’s a summary of 2015. Not as productive as I’d hoped on the writing front, but there’s a time for filling the well, isn’t there?

BOOKS READ IN 2015

Stonemouth by Iain Banks – disappointingly similar to The Crow Road and Espedair Street, with a dash of Wasp Factory.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley – twenty pages into this, I knew I wanted to read it again. The clockwork gadgets and charming characters drew me into a sense of place so genteel and stifling, yet plagued by violence; and there’s snow (always happy to read stories with snow).

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky – like reading through a subject on Wikipedia as if it were a travelogue. Not very deep but enjoyable while it lasted. Is it true, perhaps, that many of the non-federal roads between small towns in the USA originally followed animal trails between salt licks?

Concrete Island by J G Ballard – strange to imagine how anyone could write this story now, thirty years or so later, with the rise of CCTV and near-ubiquitous smartphone ownership. Can’t you hear the SatNav berating the lead character for taking a wrong turn?

Lanark by Alasdair Gray – tortuous and bitty and self-indulgent. Can’t see why it was worth waiting for. Filed with 2666 and Moby Dick under “hours of my life I’ll never get back”, but at least I finished it.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell – seminal work that claims to have laid the foundation arguments for the nationalisations of the 1945-50 Labour government. Left me with a sickly notion that the lead characters might find our current world of zero-hours contracts and crushing urban rents somewhat familiar.

Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch – having heard the author talk about this series at CrimeFest 2014 I was keen to read the novels, of which this is the first. Now, not so likely to go out of my way. Well constructed story skilfully written but didn’t hold my interest enough (too contemporary, not enough clever gadgets or magic weirdness).

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin – worth reading if you are interested in the historical groundswell that also gave us Brave New World, Metropolis and 1984. Has hints of Logan’s Run in places too. A slender tome.

I’m hoping that next year will prove a little more expansive on the reading front. Limiting my time online will help. Don’t expect much.

There’s a meme, a theory, call it what you will, that writer’s block is a poor excuse for laziness.

This is based on the premise that there’s no such thing as – for example – plumber’s block. That is, someone who makes their living as a plumber doesn’t spend days lying on a chaise longue wafting a scarf over their fevered brow while waiting for their Muse to turn up with a sink plunger and a set of tap grommets.

I agree.

There is no such thing as plumber’s block.

Because, you see, when a plumber has had enough of plumbing, be it for the day, the week or for life, he hangs up his kneepads and overalls and goes out to the pub – or the beach, or nightschool, or whatever takes his fancy.

Without feeling guilty about Not Plumbing.

If he’s been successful, he will likely have a bunch of other plumbers working for him in the pipework technician equivalent of James Patterson blockbusters.

If he hasn’t been successful, one might ask why the blazes he bothered becoming a plumber in the first place if he hated the work so much (the usual answer is either money, or self-determination).

Those of us with office jobs know only too well how that feels. Even if you haven’t endured your own, you will know someone who has broken, or is currently resisting collapse.

If you work a day job where this is rife, you’ll know how the fracture lines spread from person to person like a flaw in a cut diamond – invisible to the naked eye, until the wrong knock in the wrong place and suddenly the world is just… splinters.

I’m not broken.

I’m not even close. But I’ve seen it too often, been close in the past when tight deadlines and project goals combine with the satisfaction of doing an enjoyable job, and you spend more time than is healthy on completing a task which doesn’t bring you much personal kudos and takes you away from family, friends and fun.

Maybe that’s the problem I’ve had this year, with the fourth Petticoat Katie story in the trilogy. This novel was never meant to be written right now.

Like the novel I killed in 2012, I’ve spent so much time making excuses to myself for not finishing it, I’d have been better off ditching it and splurging on short stories and poems.

Novels are great fun to write.

But they aren’t the only outlet for my creative energies, and while there is no such thing as plumber’s block there is also a contingent activity known as filling the well.

The phrase is attributed to Julia Cameron, she of The Artist’s Way, and she also says this:

During a sustained period of work, artists require special care. We must be vigilant to not abuse our health and well-being. We must actively nurture ourselves.

While it sounds like the plumber’s chaise longue and floaty scarf again, I’m also thinking of Dean Wesley Smith’s insistence that his perfect chair is ergonomically-fitted. Or, to take a different elemental allegory, there’s Terri Windling’s timely reminder that re-kindling the fire within is feasible, even when the spark seems damped.

And I promised myself a “leisurely pace of production”. This does not involve NaNoWriMo, nor does it involve thrashing myself into a tizzy because I haven’t spawned a set word count in any particular time frame, nor does it involve me using those creative energies to come up with elaborate reasons why.

I’ve done my words for this year. The current story’s limp, a steaming pile of spaghetti I don’t have energy to pick through, and my chopsticks are broken.

Other worlds are calling me, worlds where my imagination is happily designing people and cities and a very Scottish mythology underlying stories more graphic, more elaborate, more Gothic than anything I’ve ever written.

Would you rather explore them with me, or laze around while I kick holes in the pipework?

Why the long gap between posts, when I’d hit such a good streak of posting every Wednesday?

Probably something to do with minor health issues, Extreme Gardening, and an overall lack of direction over where my writing goes from here.

I’m not about to run out of ideas – no sirree. But the Petticoat Katie series has another three novels waiting, there’s still life in Louis Beauregard yet, and I have at least two other sets of stories on my Explore Further kanban list.

Spoilt for choice.

There were books to be read, too. Stories from other people to be explored, and new art to discover. Friends to meet, focus to re-sharpen, batteries to recharge – a mini sabbatical, in effect.

And perhaps the chance to revisit the reasons why I write, especially on here, and to reduce the flow of unnecessary words that add little to the overall sum of human knowledge but still suck energy from the planet.

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ABOUT ME

Lee McAulay is a novelist and writer. Her novels include The Last Rhinemaiden and Shadowbox, based around the fictional Cuckoo Club. She also writes the Petticoat Katie series as Vita Tugwell (Maiden Flight, Boom Town & Monkey Business).
Lee lives and works in the UK.